A renewed debate has emerged over who should control the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The latest dispute follows an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has argued that the development of increasingly powerful AI systems needs to slow down, calling for greater regulation. US President Donald Trump pushed back, writing on Truth Social that the US already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power” over AI companies, framing safety concerns as a conspiracy that only benefits China.
He went on to say that whoever wins the AI race wins outright. As states grapple with how to regulate an industry developing at an unprecedented pace, Al Jazeera unpacks the companies driving the AI race and the trillions of dollars behind them. Chatbots and large language models are only the visible tip of the AI industry.
Beneath them sits a much larger ecosystem of hardware, infrastructure, and software. These companies can be broadly grouped into three categories: At the foundation of the AI industry are the companies that design and manufacture the physical chips AI runs on, along with the equipment that keeps data centres powered and cooled. These are the companies that turn raw chips into usable computing power, delivering the storage and processing capacity that AI systems run on.
These are the companies that create the AI products people and businesses actually use. The 10 largest public companies operating in the AI space – spanning AI chips, cloud infrastructure, and AI-driven software and services – have a combined market capitalisation of at least $25 trillion. That’s bigger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of every country except the United States, and larger than the entire Chinese economy.
The graphic below shows the 20 most valuable public companies with direct exposure to AI, ranked by market capitalisation. Nvidia is the largest AI-focused public company, with a market capitalisation of roughly $5.1 trillion as of mid-September 2026. It designs graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI accelerators – hardware components in a chip that speed up AI workloads – that power leading AI models.
It makes its money by selling these chips to hyperscalers and AI companies. Apple, while primarily a hardware company, has invested heavily in on-device AI features and its market cap of $4.86 trillion makes it one of the most valuable companies with any AI exposure. Its main AI product, Siri AI, launched in 2026 and runs on Google’s Gemini models under a licensing deal.
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